Overwatch
by medicgirl
Summary: Mac questions everything while waiting at Jack’s bedside. But even on the other side of the world, he has someone to look out for him... Might seem OOC, but at his worst moments, even Mac has to get worn down by the evil in the world


Meticulously, almost obsessively, MacGyver scraped at the blood under his nails with his knife, knowing well that the specks of it he sees might only be in his mind as he had scrubbed his hands nearly raw in the last 48 hours. He quickly put the knife away, realizing that kind of behavior was how shell-shocked men sometimes wound up with stitches or worse, and Jack would have a fit if he woke up and found Mac had hurt himself while he was out.

If Jack woke up…

Frantically trying to remove that particular thought from his mind, he dumped another half bottle of alcohol gel on his hands. His rational mind knew that he had already gotten all of Jack's blood off his hands, but part of him felt like it still stained him, marked him as not fast enough to knock Jack out of the way or not smart enough to figure it out in time. Jack often acted like he was an innocent kid, but he was a lot closer to thirty than twenty. And he had scrubbed way too much blood from his hands to feel like he was ever innocent… Still, Jack would lay down his life in a second to protect him. In a half-second, a nanosecond even. But this time, Mac's brain, the very thing that made him valuable to the international community, had been too slow to recognize the trap, his word of warning had come too late to stop the bullets that had slammed Jack about five feet back down the hallway. Three of them hit his chest with massive concussive force but were stopped by Kevlar. One bounced harmlessly off a wall, but one slammed through just a quarter of an inch below the vest to the right. It tore through the nylon at the bottom of the protective layer… if Jack had been wearing his favorite Adidas running shoes instead of his tactical boots, it would have just been another painful bruise to ice.

The alcohol gel burned his raw hands as tears burned in his eyes. Tears of fear, pain, and worry, knowing when (if!) Jack woke up, he would face a long, painful rehab, that there was still a huge risk of deadly infection in the damaged kidney that had barely managed to repair, and that he still had to face a surgery to repair the shattered right side of his pelvic girdle. If the blood loss and the shunting of what blood he had kept in his veins hadn't damaged his body or his brain beyond repair. He hurt for Jack, hurt for himself, realizing that there was a good chance he could loose his closest family member here in Cambodia in the only major trauma center, thousands of miles from anyone who knew them or cared. He hurt for what it would do to Riley, having found her prodigal father-figure again after so many years. He hurt for a sweet old woman in Texas that had insisted from the first time he met her that he call her Momma, who either way this turned out was going to either have to see her only real son through the agony of getting back on his feet, or burying him and trying in vain to keep her unofficially adopted son from falling completely apart… and while he never doubted Momma Dalton's strength or will (she had survived raising Jack, after all) but he just didn't think she had the ability to hold him together if he lost Jack, and probably not the desire either after she found out how Mac had let him down.

He knew in their line of work prices on their heads were an occupational hazard, and that the bounty for his own death would fund a small third-world country for a decade, but this was different. Not just because it was Jack, who's life meant more to Mac than his own, but because they were there to HELP these people!

The so-called "relief group" who were supposed to be the ones providing aid and medical treatment to those in the more dangerous areas of the continent had contacted the Phoenix Foundation about their head doctor and director being kidnapped. The ransom demand was impossible, two viable kidneys and a transplant for a rebel group's leader, which they had no way of providing. Their government had turned their back on them, and they needed help.

In reality, the ones who ran the group were tired of being constantly underfunded (and Mac suspected at least half of their funding was in someone's pocket rather than used to render aid) and decided that the life of an American former soldier who had made plenty of enemies with deep bankrolls was worth it to solve their money problems. And when they tracked him, a call with a sob story and it was as easy as ordering pizza… One valuable bounty, all but delivered on a platter.

Mac couldn't shake the feeling that he should have figured it out. Especially when they were told so easily where he was being held by a so-called informant. But they had done their best John Wayne and rushed in, literally and figuratively guns blazing. They had been stealthy on their way to the compound, and expected at least a few moments of surprise and chaos.

But when the door wasn't even locked, with no visible security, Mac had barely opened his mouth to warn Jack that something was fishy when the narrow hallway lit up with gunfire. If he had put it together a second sooner, he could have stopped them from going in, or tackled Jack out of the line of fire, something! Other than the one thing he had done, the only chance he or Jack had was the one thing he would rather take a bullet than do. Jack always had a second pistol and Mac always knew where it was. He shot them. Five men, five shots. He told people he hated guns. He never told them he couldn't use one. But those nightmares would come in time. Right now all that mattered was the man in front of him, way too pale and still, his blood pressure still only four digits. He didn't regret killing them, he realized, which startled him somewhat.

But not all the tears stinging his eyes and cheeks were from pain or fear or guilt. Something else clawed at the bottom of his mind, fighting to be acknowledged. He knew that something else well, had fought hard all his life to keep it under lock and key in a hole so deep in his mind that it would never find its way out.

However, the human brain (even one as advanced as Angus MacGyver's) Just didn't work that way, and the deep, vicious, terrifying rage welled up in him as if from a broken water pipe.

Or maybe a sewer pipe would be more apt, considering what it did to his mind. It clouded his thinking, made him think things he was definitely not proud of. Like how many bullets he could have put in the men before taking a kill shot. He shook his head to clear it. Those men weren't even that good at aiming. Obviously they weren't professional, one had even jammed the ancient weapon after the first shot and was still fighting to fix it when a bullet obliterated his throat. If they had been better shots, Jack would be dead, and most likely so would he.

But while that kind of thought was bad enough to entwine with his already overdeveloped sense of guilt, the other kind of angry thoughts were even worse. Even on his worst day, he knew he could not ever become that kind of person. Even if he lost Jack, and Bozer and everything he cared about, he didn't think he was capable of becoming someone who intentionally hurt people. It just wasn't in him. He would do what he had to do to help people, to save people, and to protect his friends, but outside of that? His conscience would eat him alive…

But the other kind of thought… that was different. That was possible to fall into, for it to hit him at his weakest and worm it's way deep into his psyche… Nothing short of a traumatic brain injury could turn him into a killer, but there was enough pain and anger in him that if he didn't keep it tightly corralled deep in a tiny locked box that he didn't acknowledge, it could turn him cold. It could make him indifferent. If he let himself think that they travelled halfway around the world to help these people and in return they tried to take the one thing from him he wasn't willing to sacrifice… He bit down on the inside of his cheek hard enough to draw blood trying to shoot that thought down half-formed, but it echoed through his mind like a scream in a cave.

Why bother?

"Please, Jack…" he whispered aloud, not knowing if the unconscious man in the bed could hear him or not. "Please wake up. You're the one who always snaps me back when I'm about to break. Please come back before I do!"

Mac just about jumped out of his chair when the curtain beside him moved. They had been in this room almost sixteen hours since they were moved out of surgical observation, and had he really been so out of it that he didn't realize it wasn't a private room?! He faced a blond man about Jack's age staring back at him. The man was American! Before Mac could open his mouth to say anything (most likely ask if the guy had been there all along) when the man said calmly in a soft southern accent not quite as deep as Jack's "You ok, son?"

Mac opened and closed his Mia few times, still thrown by the other man's presence. (Oh, shit, how much of his thoughts did he say out loud??) Before finally telling this complete stranger the truth. "I honestly don't know…"

"Brother?" He asked , looking at Jack.

Without hesitation, he nodded. "Yeah, my big brother. He was… hurt badly."

"May I?" He asked, gesturing to the other chair beside Jack's bed.

Blinking, a little confused, but his emotions were a mess and he just felt alone like he hadn't since he was ten years old. "Yeah, please. I'm Stephen, and this is Adam." He rattled off their cover names without even thinking about it.

"You can call me Lee," the stranger said, taking the seat. "My wife and I are missionaries here. "Do you mind if I…?"

Again, it took Mac a second to comprehend, then his eyes widened. "Yes, absolutely! We will take any help we can get!"

Lee placed his hand over Jack's and bowed his head. There was a moment of silence as he prayed for Jack, and that simple gesture was enough to bring tears welling up in Mac's eyes. "Thank you."

"No problem. There's nothing more I can do for him, but you look like someone who could really use a friend right now. I know you don't know me, but if you want to talk, I'm a good listener…"

Mac looked down at the man he would call his brother any time, not just when it was their cover. The only one he could ever completely trust with his feelings might never open his eyes again, and that shattered his resistance. A tear broke lose and fled down his cheek before he could stop it. "He's all I've got. I can't lose him!"

"What happened?" Lee asked. "If it's not too much to ask."

"Mac shook his head, strangely wishing he could tell this stranger the whole truth. But the cover was close enough to get the point across. "We were here as aid workers, building water purifiers out in the jungle. The people we were helping decided that holding us for ransom might be a better idea. We escaped. He got shot, and I don't know if he is going to wake up again!"

Lee frowned, and for a panicked moment Mac thought He wasn't buying the story, but then he shook his head. "It's awful when you try to help someone and they do something like that. I'm so sorry."

Mac nodded. "Other than the idea of losing him, that's the hard part. We… well, we do a lot of stuff like this. Engineering projects like this, trying to help people." He ran a shaky hand through his disheveled hair and sighed. "I used to think we were gonna save the world. And sometimes, it even felt like we had… But for what? For people who would rather sell people for money than…" He let out a broken laugh. "It's like that Pixar movie with the superheroes, ya know? The world always gets right back in trouble again. Sometimes I wish it would just stay saved!" A few more tears broke loose, and he said to the stranger what he would never admit, even to Jack. "I'm tired, ya know? I've always been the good guy, the helper, but sometimes it's just too much, and sometimes it just asks too much! I'll sacrifice a lot to help people, even if it's not appreciated, but I draw the line at giving up my only family to help people who don't even want help!"

His eyes widened in shock, had he really just said all that?! Out loud??! The last thing he needed was to channel Jack's usual method of coping and just say whatever flew through his mind! "Look, I'm sorry, I shouldn't even think that stuff…"

But as he looked up at the stranger, he saw empathy rather than judgement. "Listen, kid, I don't know you, you don't know me, and unless you wind up in South Carolina or we meet somewhere like this again, we're not gonna ever see each other again, but let me tell you what I do know, and what you already know, too." He looked up at watery blue eyes to make sure Mac was listening. "You don't mean any of that. You are not the kind of person who could ever quit caring, quit trying to help people. They may not deserve your help, but that's nothing to you. You are too strong to let other people change you. Right now, you are talking out of pain and anger and worry, but when your brother wakes up, none of that will matter."

Mac didn't want to sound petulant, but for a stranger, he was hitting uncomfortably close to the mark. "And if he doesn't?"

"Then you will keep doing what you do to honor him."

Mac nodded. This guy was right, of course. He had fought his entire life to keep other people from changing who he was, he couldn't let these people do what he had refused to let even his father do. "You're right. He would be so mad at me if I walked away and quit caring…"

"He's not going to, because he's going to wake up soon. You'll help him through this, and you two will be back to saving the world in no time!"

Mac actually smiled at the words. Of course he was right. Jack would wake up and everything would be okay. "Thank you. I don't know how you knew any of that, but I'm glad you were here."

Lee stood and said "I'm going to go get some coffee, want me to bring you back some?"

Mac also stood, and put out his hand to shake. "No, I'll pass, but thanks a lot. When… when someone I care about is in danger, I kinda lose my head a little. I can't think, or maybe I think too much, or something, but thank you for pulling me out of it."

Lee shook his hand firmly. "My pleasure, kid. And take care of your brother, he will need you." He turned and was out the door as Mac sat back down, and took Jack's hand.

Lee was almost to the end of the hallway before he pulled out the encrypted cell phone and dialed the number. "Yeah, I just left. Just like you said, he was about to lose it. Poor kid was questioning everything in his life basically."

He listened to the voice on the other end for a second. "Yeah, Matty, I'm glad I was on assignment here too, and glad to help… Dalton? He'll wake up soon. Was starting to move his fingers while I was in there… They'll both be fine."


End file.
